R4i card

The Benefits of R4 Cards
The introduction of R4 Cards has transformed the Nintendo DS and indeed the
Nintendo gaming department as a whole. With the Nintendo's PS3 and Xbox rival the
' Gamecube' gradually failing to keep up with it's competitors, the former gaming giants
fortunes were left resting solely with the Nintendo Wi . Whilst the Wi has managed to
revive much of the struggling companies market share, the Nintendo DS did not have
the same power over the PSP. However, when the R4 cards were released to work
alongside the Nintendo DS and allow essentially internal storage, the Nintendo DS was
transformed from what was generally seen as an advanced version of the gameboy, to
more like a combination of phone, mp3 player, dvd player and gameboy!
The R4i card may not have technical y revolutionised the Nintendo DS directly but it
certainly enhanced every single aspect of the console. Like the M3 DS cartridge, the R4
al ows you to play multimedia files, including video, images and audio, through your
Nintendo DS in addition to making the gaming experience more interactive. One of the
beautiful things about them is there simplicity, the fact that instal ation is simple and
easy for even the most technophobic of users amongst us. Just in case you do find it
difficult however, the manual for all of the popular R4 card choices have an easy to read
and simply diagram to show you exactly how to insert the card and make the most of it.
Another benefit of the R4i card is that they are quick when it comes to loading,
something that whilst you couldn't justify basing your selection on, is a very useful and
under appreciated feature of the cards. Within just a couple of seconds you can be up
and running with your game or watching a film, rather than having to a wait a while like
some cartridges.
The variety of sizes and cost of the R4i card and the SD cards you can use with them is
also something that has improved rapidly since it was first launched. Years ago SD
cards were limited to MB's, now you can find cards with memory of over 60GB,
subsequently massively increasing the memory capacity of your Nintendo DS. This may
sound like it's going to be expensive, and initially it was. However, as the number of SD
cards and SD manufacturers increased, they competed with each other on price, driving
down the total price of the cards and making higher memory capacities much more
affordable for the local consumer. In fact, 1GB SD Cards are available for as little as 3
these days which would hold about one and a half films or 300 songs. A 64GB which
holds closer to a hundred films and more like 12000 songs, costs as little as 35 and
can transform your nintendo DS thanks to the R4 cards. You may be forgiven for
thinking ' well surely that's more a benefit of the SD card than the R4 card' but the
reality is that the R4 card al ows you access to this cheaper form of external memory,
rather than being more like an iPod for example where you would acquire the whole
device with a fixed memory capacity.

---